Archive

Nerval’s Lobster writes “Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is unapologetic about his love for Facebook. ‘I think all software is going to look like Facebook,’ he told media and analysts at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. ‘Everyone is going to have to rewrite to have a feed-based platform.’ If people can collaborate on tagging a photo, he added, they could easily do the same with a product or business problem. Even as Benioff touted his Facebook love, however, Salesforce is veering away from the Facebook model in one key way: whereas Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg felt his company focused too much on HTML5 for its mobile apps, choosing to focus instead on native-app development, Salesforce is embracing HTML5 for its Salesforce Touch app, which delivers Salesforce data such as Chatter feeds and contacts to a variety of mobile devices.”

An anonymous reader writes “Speaking yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the company’s stock performance was disappointing. He also made an interesting remark about Facebook’s development efforts over the past couple of years: ‘The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native. It just wasn’t ready.’ According to Mashable, ‘the benefits of cross-platform development weren’t enough to outweigh the downsides of HTML5, which pulls in data much more slowly than native code, and is much less stable. … Now, Zuckerberg says, Facebook is focused on continuing to improve the native mobile experience on iOS, as well as bringing a native app to Android.’”

Browser or app: Which is a better way to reach readers on mobile platforms like iOS and Android? Publishers and developers haven’t been shy about offering their opinions, but what about the people who actually use the devices? Among tablet owners, at least, reading on the mobile Web is preferable to using native apps, according to a recent survey from the Online Publishers Association.

Forty-one percent of tablet-bound readers prefer reading on the Web, compared to the 30% who would rather launch a standalone app from a specific publisher. Aggregated news-reading apps like Flipboard and Zite rated surprisingly low on the list.

Last month, Jason Pontin, editor of MIT Technology Review, wrote a widely read takedown of native apps, citing Apple’s steep revenue share and the technical and design challenges associated with producing such apps.

“But the real problem with apps was more profound,” Pontin wrote. “When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn’t really link.”

Many publishers have found that approach problematic. Apple’s infamous 30% subscription revenue cut prompted the Financial Times to abandon its iOS apps and instead focus on developing a cross-platform Web app written in HTML5.

“I’ve seen Apple’s results,” FT.com Managing Director Rob Grimshaw said at the PaidContent 2012 conference last month. “It seems to be working for Apple. I’ve also seen some publishers’ results, and it’s not working for publishers.”

Evidently, the native-app approach is not working for readers, either – at least, not as well as the Web. FT has seen an increase in readership and paid subscriptions since going the HTML5 route, Grimshaw said.

Native apps do offer potential advantages in terms of the reader’s experience. They can be more immersive and lack some of the design limitations of the Web. Still, in far too many cases, apps created by publishers end up being little more than digital reproductions of the print product with a few bells and whistles tacked on.

From the reader’s standpoint, it makes sense that the Web would be a popular option for tablet reading. After all, there’s much more content there, and it’s intricately linked together. A digital magazine can offer a refreshing escape from the anarchy of the Web, but it’s only a matter of time before readers find it necessary to return to a browser.

The OPA report contained other revealing data about tablet users. Overall, tablet ownership is surging. The devices have become “deeply embedded” in users’ lives, 74% of whom use them daily. Tablet owners are using the devices primarily to interact with content of various kinds, and most (61%) show a willingness to pay for it.

Browser or app: Which is a better way to reach readers on mobile platforms like iOS and Android? Publishers and developers haven’t been shy about offering their opinions, but what about the people who actually use the devices? Among tablet owners, at least, reading on the mobile Web is preferable to using native apps, according to a recent survey from the Online Publishers Association.

Forty-one percent of tablet-bound readers prefer reading on the Web, compared to the 30% who would rather launch a standalone app from a specific publisher. Aggregated news-reading apps like Flipboard and Zite rated surprisingly low on the list.

Last month, Jason Pontin, editor of MIT Technology Review, wrote a widely read takedown of native apps, citing Apple’s steep revenue share and the technical and design challenges associated with producing such apps.

“But the real problem with apps was more profound,” Pontin wrote. “When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn’t really link.”

Many publishers have found that approach problematic. Apple’s infamous 30% subscription revenue cut prompted the Financial Times to abandon its iOS apps and instead focus on developing a cross-platform Web app written in HTML5.

“I’ve seen Apple’s results,” FT.com Managing Director Rob Grimshaw said at the PaidContent 2012 conference last month. “It seems to be working for Apple. I’ve also seen some publishers’ results, and it’s not working for publishers.”

Evidently, the native-app approach is not working for readers, either – at least, not as well as the Web. FT has seen an increase in readership and paid subscriptions since going the HTML5 route, Grimshaw said.

Native apps do offer potential advantages in terms of the reader’s experience. They can be more immersive and lack some of the design limitations of the Web. Still, in far too many cases, apps created by publishers end up being little more than digital reproductions of the print product with a few bells and whistles tacked on.

From the reader’s standpoint, it makes sense that the Web would be a popular option for tablet reading. After all, there’s much more content there, and it’s intricately linked together. A digital magazine can offer a refreshing escape from the anarchy of the Web, but it’s only a matter of time before readers find it necessary to return to a browser.

The OPA report contained other revealing data about tablet users. Overall, tablet ownership is surging. The devices have become “deeply embedded” in users’ lives, 74% of whom use them daily. Tablet owners are using the devices primarily to interact with content of various kinds, and most (61%) show a willingness to pay for it.

Now that Showyou has made the remote control obsolete, it has set its sights on the other place we watch video: the desktop. Today, its magical video grid is available on Showyou.com. If you spend any time browsing and watching videos on YouTube.com, your habits are about to change.

The Features

Showyou has YouTube. It also gets videos from Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Vodpod, which is parent company Remixation’s own video-sharing network. You can also follow other Showyou users. When you connect your social networks to Showyou, it starts indexing all the videos from your feeds and presenting them to you in a personalized feed for your surfing pleasure. You can also save videos to watch later, and the list will show up wherever you use Showyou.

It also has fast and accurate search by topic or hashtag. Since it has data about the habits and preferences of avid Web video viewers, as well as social data from a variety of networks, it’s much better at finding relevant videos than any one video site’s search engine.

But the key is in that interface. The magical grid is the most effortless way to discover something new to watch. Forget YouTube’s spam-ridden related videos menu. Forget painful navigation on your TV. Just swipe, scroll, or click and drag in any direction, and Showyou will populate your screen with more videos. When you pick one, it pops up in a full-sized player.

The Showyou Web grid is responsive, so it resizes to fit your browser window. That also means you can use Showyou on any device, even if the native app isn’t supported. “This sets us up nicely to offer HTML5-based experiences on other mobile and tablet platforms,” says Remixation CEO Mark Hall.

For now, you need an invitation to get into the Web view, but if you download the app, you have one. Android users can get Showyou from the Amazon Appstore, but it’s a Kindle Fire-sized version. For those who can’t get into the Web version themselves, any other user can invite you.

Why Move to the Web?

The mobile Showyou app changes the living room. Especially for Apple TV users, the ability to browse videos on Showyou and play them on the TV is enough to make you cancel your cable. (Well, maybe.)

But people still spend an insane amount of time watching videos on YouTube, and that browsing experience is not very good. If you use Showyou on the Web instead, you not only get a better browsing experience that syncs with your mobile devices, but you get videos from across different networks as well.

The social part of the service is one of Showyou’s main reasons for expanding to the Web. “We want to allow all of the people who have our app now to connect with their friends,” says Hall. “Not all of them have an iPad or iPhone. The Web provides a way for people who have the app to connect with their friends, and share videos with them.”

Showyou is doing this to grow the service, but it’s also a win for existing users. There’s now one app for viewing and sharing videos across devices, and you can still get in early and snag a good user name. For an example of what you’ll get, check out my grid: showyou.com/jonm.

It works on all modern browsers (IE 9 support will be finished in coming weeks), but it’s a wee bit slow on Firefox right now. The team is working on it as we speak.

The mobile advertising industry was a $1 billion business in 2011. For reference, it was 1998 when Web advertising hit the $1 billion mark. In 2010, it was a $26 billion industry fueling the growth of companies like Google and other Web-centric properties. Mobile advertising is expected to be a $6.5 billion industry by 2014, according to eMarketer.

What does this mean to you, the mobile app developer? Well, there is opportunity in front of you that is not correlated to paid downloads or in-app purchases. Mobile targeting platform Jumptap’sMobileSTAT report for January 2012 shows that the mobile Web and native apps are a 50/50 market. Where does your focus go? Jumptap recommends taking a look at your target audience.

Of course Jumptap will say that you should research your target audience when initializing a mobile advertising strategy. Foremost, it is common sense. Secondly, that is precisely the service that the company offers. It makes a difference though. Mobile Web users are not necessarily within the same target demographic that hardcore native app users are. It also depends on which platform they are using.

For instance, iOS continues to see better click-through rates on mobile ads than Android. Jumptap also notes that click-through rates are higher for users with the newer versions of the platform, with .91% clicking through on iOS 5 against .74% for iOS 4. On the other hand, Android sees a .69% click-through rate for devices running some version of Android 2.x (which, for all intents and purposes, is the only metric that matters right now).

When it comes to Web v. native, there is no clear winner. By Dec. 2011, 50.7% of Jumptap’s traffic was native against 49.3% for the mobile Web. What it comes down to is what a user intends to do with their device. Shopping and search are more popular activities on the Web while connecting and navigation are better suited to apps, according to a white paper from Yahoo in Aug. 2011.

Tablets are also making a stronger push in Jumptap’s network. That is not really surprising, considering Apple’s monster quarter, the arrival of the Kindle Fire and general popularity of tablet devices. The Fire had 30% of the company’s mobile advertising tablet share by the end of December, after starting the month with only 10%. In correlation, the iPad’s share fell from 59% on Dec. 1 to 44% on Dec. 31. Overall, tablet traffic had a peak growth of 263% by the beginning of January.

Extrapolating to the larger ecosystem, companies like Facebook have a big stake to gain in mobile advertising. As we noted in Facebook’s risk sections of its S-1 yesterday, the ability to turn mobile users into mobile dollars will be extremely important for the social giant.

From a developer perspective, we can add these totals to the prognosis of the mobile app ecosystem when we saw the results of Apple’s first quarter results in January. We predicted that the overall app ecosystem could be worth about $6 billion in sales and in-app purchases in 2012. Add another $2.5 billion or so in mobile advertising revenue to that pie and the overall market that publishers are chasing falls well within the $7 billion -$10 billion range this year with greater prospectus for growth in coming years.

The ecosystem still remains a top-heavy environment. The best 10%-20% of apps and mobile websites will grab the majority of the revenue in all likelihood. That means that companies like Facebook and Google will benefit from the advertising pie while iOS and Android developers will benefit from the larger and more fluid ecosystem.

What do you drink when you’re out at the bar? What do you brag about afterwards? If you’re like a lot of Untappd users in the United States, they’re not the same thing. At least that’s what the data from Untappd suggests, according to lead developer and co-founder Greg Avola.

Avola spoke on February 1st in London at the Monki Gras. As part of a larger talk about Untappd and its growth, Avola talked about the aggregated data that the company has gleaned from user shares via the Untappd app.

But do they choose? That depends a lot on what they drink, according to Avola.

Users, especially in the United States, check in a lot of mass market beers that aren’t seen as very high quality. For instance, Coors Light or Bud Light. There’s no status in sharing those beers, though – and so users tend not to. On the other hand, they do tend to share craft beers or beers that are higher status like Sierra Nevada or Lagunitas Sucks Holiday Ale.

Interestingly, Avola also showed the aggregated data from the UK and found that it was much more closely correlated between what users drank and shared. Perhaps that has something to do with the quality of mass market beers found in the UK, or the strength of craft beers here. (Something we’ll be testing tonight at the evening activity for Monki Gras.)

It’s not just the beverages that users tend to clam up about. Avola noted that people tend to share less, even when they check in, about drinking during the week or daytime. Not surprisingly, even if you have a fantastic beer in the airport before a flight, you probably don’t want your social graph seeing that you had a beer at noon.

Social Sharing: You’re Doing It Wrong

On a similar note, Matt LeMay reprised his Kitteh vs. Chikin talk from Monktoberfest about what users share versus what they click. Users share links that make them look smart, they click links that… well, don’t. For example, links about the Kardashian family do very well. Nobody looks smart following them, though, and a lot fewer users share those links.

LeMay says that users are busy building a persona on social media of what they want to look like, rather than who they really are. And that’s a shame. What might seem embarrassing is also what makes us interesting. LeMay says that users “shouldn’t run from it. Like beer, just because it can be bad for you if you drink too much, we should still embrace it. People who act like brands [on social media] are assholes. We hate them.”

If you’re ashamed to post your beers, maybe you shouldn’t be. Certainly, it distorts reality if you observe friends sharing their beverage choices only when quaffing craft or high-quality beers (and high-quality links).

Beer and Gamification

Sometimes, though, reality needs a little kick in the pants. If you want to influence what people are drinking, you have to provide motivation. Breweries want to influence users, obviously and connecting breweries to users is part of Untappd’s business model.

To motivate beer intake, Untapped has introduced the badge system. When users “win” badges for trying new beers, they’re more apt to try them. Avola noted that releasing a badge for drinking three of five beers by Dogfish Head increased the check-ins for that beer by a large amount, and helped the brewery sell more beers. Of course, this is the honor system. Avola says that the breweries do see increases in sales, but it’s impossible to tell if users are actually drinking the beers they’re checking in.

How does all this apply to folks outside of Untappd or Bit.ly? First and most obviously, don’t feel you need to moderate your presence on social media quite so tightly. People might actually be more interested in what you have to say if you let warts and all show. (Within limits, of course. It’s always better to be polite, etc.)

It’s also good to know that what others share may not completely reflect reality. If your company is sampling social media to get feedback, you need to think about what may be influencing people when they share things. If you’re using social media to size up potential employees, you may want to look closely at what they share and consider if they’re showing the real person, or a crafted persona that’s what they think people want to see.

Grooveshark may have been booted from both the iTunes App Store and Android Market, but that’s not stopping the controversial music streaming startup from forging ahead with its mobile strategy. Rather than going back and forth with Apple and Google, the company has taken matters into its own hands by launching a Web app that forgoes Flash in favor of HTML5.

The Grooveshark HTML5 app can stream music from any modern mobile browser, including Safari on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Until now, the service wouldn’t work on (non-jailbroken) iOS devices, since the desktop Web app for Grooveshark utilizes Flash for playback.

Like any good mobile Web app, Grooveshark’s has the feel of a native application, albeit a visually stripped-down one. Users can search for music, listen to pre-built stations or stream what’s trending under the “Popular” tab. It borrows a few UI conventions from native mobile apps, such as sliding down and releasing to load more content. On the iPad, the app’s interface scales up nicely and plays back without any major problems. You can even minimize Safari and let it stream in the background while you do other things.

There’s a Cross-Platform Compatible HTML5 Mobile Web App For That

Grooveshark isn’t the first company to use the power of HTML5 to circumvent proprietary app store restrictions. The Financial Times launched a Web app of its own last year to get around Apple’s steep subscription revenue share requirements. The browser-based version functioned as well as any basic native app and even led to an increase in mobile traffic for the Financial Times, thanks to its cross-platform compatibility.

Amazon has made HTML5 an increasingly central part of its mobile strategy as well, launching the Web-based Kindle Cloud Reader and more recently unveiling an iPad-optimized Kindle e-book store.

Grooveshark’s reasons for having to go around Apple and Google are a bit different than Amazon’s. The music startup isn’t so much concerned about subscription revenue share terms, but rather has been ejected from native app stores because of the legally-questionable nature of its functionality and business model. The company is currently being sued by every major music label, with EMI recently piling on despite being the only one with which Grooveshark has a formal deal in place. The company allegedly hasn’t been forthcoming with royalty payments to EMI, so the label has taken Grooveshark to court. Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner were already litigating against the company, accusing it of permitting widespread copyright infringement.

Grooveshark’s longterm viability in the face of these lawsuits may be unclear, but for now the company is pushing forward and making its service available to more smartphone and tablet users.

One of the greatest benefits of the mobile Web is that it gives a variety of small to medium businesses an easy way to create a mobile presence without spending a lot of money on native app development. There are a variety of services that can optimize a website for the mobile Web and one of those, DudaMobile, is celebrating a big milestone today.

DudaMobile has converted one million websites to the mobile Web. It is a significant sign of the times. Whenever we write about the services that propose to turn normal websites into mobile sites, the same term is always bandied about: cookie cutter. To a certain extent, both FiddleFly and Conduit provide the same type of service. Conduit is more evolved as it makes it easy for users to turn websites into and actual native apps and submit them to the Apple App Store and Android Market. FiddleFly on the other hand is very similar to DudaMobile and targets nearly the same audience.

DudaMobile post examples of the mobile sites it creates on its Facebook page. It is worth taking a look to see what the company does with its design elements. For pure empirical point of view, outside of logos and color schemes, there is not much differentiation outside of several different themes. To a certain extent, this is to be expected. How many different wire frames can a studio effectively create before its margins go out the window because it now has to support all its different variations?

The company touts “dozens of design templates to choose from.” If you know any rudimentary CSS, it also offers an advanced design studio. It is WordPress friendly and offers traditional analytics services. Like most of these services, DudaMobile repackages a desktop website into mobile and thus proclaims that it automatically syncs with your normal website. Being born of the Web, these sites are also compatible across the variety of mobile platforms. There will likely be different results from the variety of mobile browsers available.

DudaMobile offers two tiers of development. The free version offers 10 pages with 500 MB of bandwidth and does not offer a personalized URL but rather dudamobile.com/yourcompany. If a business is willing to pay $9.00 a month it will create a legitimate m.site (m.yourcompany.com) with unlimited pages and bandwidth.

Do you have a Duda-powered website? What have your experiences been with the service? How does it compare to FiddleFly or Conduit? Let us know in the comments.

Forrester asserts that hybrid HTML5 apps are less expensive to develop than native apps. This and more in today’s Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it’s difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

Should you develop a native app or an HTML5 app that will run on multiple platforms? A Forrester report aims to answer the question. For the cost-conscious developer, hybrid HTML5 apps provide more value than attempting to create native apps across the four major mobile platforms.

From the comments:

Piotr Steininger — “Having developed several hybrids now, I have to disagree with the broad statement: ‘In the future we are likely to see a majority of apps built in this fashion.’

I’m a veteran web developer and that includes Sproutcore and jQuery. I love web technologies. I was a huge fan of PhoneGap based apps. That is… until I went through the process of building and maintaining a several of them.

Hybrid development may make sense on SOME tablet devices – namely iPad and iPad2. Even those have limitations. When it comes to Android, no animations/transforms are hardware accelerated and user experience is dismal at best (even on Honeycomb).’ (more of Piotr’s insightful comment)

More Must Read Stories:

Many of ReadWriteWeb’s readers are old hands at Twitter, but the service gets thousands of new users every day. That includes a lot of folks who suddenly need to use Twitter as part of their job. If you’re just being introduced to the joys of Twitter (or introducing it to another user), here’s a short and friendly primer on what you need to know about using the site. (more)

Students who share certain tastes in movies and music – but not in books – are more likely to friend each other on Facebook, according to a study released in November that has been getting attention in academic circles. (more)

The Stop Online Piracy Act. The mere thought of the controversial Internet regulation bill passing even one house of Congress keeps you up at night. You’ve already transferred all of your domains from GoDaddy, even after they flip-flopped on their SOPA stance. You instinctively click on every anti-SOPA story on Reddit and Hacker News, voting up the best of them. On the Internet, you’ve eagerly joined the growing army of digital activists opposing the law, but what about the real world? What about when you go to the store? (more)

If you are looking to virtualize some of your data center and host it in the cloud, you probably have heard about Amazon’s EC2 by now. But one IT shop used EC2 as a strawman to consider what they really needed from their eventual service provider. It is interesting and instructive to see the steps that WoundVision took for this process. The company produces a risk assessment software solution supported by infrared thermal imaging for early wound detection. (more)

A new report out from Sitel on social media and consumer trends implies that social media is key to reaching Gen Y (those born between 1980 and 2000), but the numbers don’t add up. While the Gen Y, or people born between 1980-2000, are in fact “digital natives,” that doesn’t mean they are actually most reachable via social media marketing. (more)

A devastating assessment of the course of technology growth last Friday from technology analyst Forrester flies in the face of what competitive firms would consider “conventional wisdom,” to say that before cloud computing truly commands the attention of enterprise network architects, a few other dramas currently in progress must play themselves out first. (more)

Anybody with a passing interest in the headlines pouring out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas cannot help but identify one major theme: 2012 is the year that the TV will converge with mobile platforms. For all of the talk that CES has lost its clout, it is still a good source for identifying trends that will drive the innovation of major technology companies in the new year. Last year tablets and dual-core processors were all the rage. This year, developers have something bigger on their minds. (more)

When technology pundits say mobile is exploding, many people just shrug and say “of course.” Many people might not fully comprehend just how big mobile is growing and the enormous ecosystem that it now encompasses. Mobile computing through smartphones and tablets is growing four times faster than the PC and Internet evolutions of the 1980′s and 90′s. People are now using mobile apps more than the Web and the gap continues to widen. (more)